One Modest Proposal
by snarkypants
Summary: The further adventures of Pike and Number One, post-Narada. This one comes after my story "An Afternoon in Ordinary Time," and before my "Semper Paratus," but, like the cheese, it can stand alone.


**One Modest Proposal **by snarkypants

Pike had been extraordinarily pensive in the hours leading up to the change of command, but Number One chalked it up his reluctance to relinquish E_nterprise_ to Kirk; no matter how decisively the younger man had acquired the helm, she was Chris's baby, and he would always regret her. But his reticence continued afterwards, through the reception and all of the toasts drunk to fallen comrades, even through the happier toasts drunk to the ship and her newly minted crew.

One had consumed far more ethanol than was her wont and she was feeling unusually mellow, but Chris still had that pucker between his eyebrows and his jaw was set like durasteel.

It was just the two of them; he had dismissed the unfortunate yeoman who had pulled the duty of wheeling him into and out of the more official clusterfucks. Pike's arms worked quite well, thank you, and it ate at him to be pushed around like an infant in a stroller.

She accompanied him back to the Starfleet Medical post-op unit that was his de facto home—and by extension, hers—until Chris was released to physical therapy. Her dark dress uniform and dark hair blended into the violet light of gloaming; only her skin was visible to him, and even that looked otherworldly. He stopped the chair, forcing her to stop and turn to face him. "Marry me, One."

"That's not a legal order, Admiral," she said lightly.

"I'm serious. We should formalize things; if I were in a civilian hospital, somewhere neither of us had pull, you wouldn't be able to visit me for more than an hour or so at a time."

"Perhaps you should just work on staying out of the hospital." She turned, and continued her slow, slightly unsteady pace.

He pushed the chair forward, catching her up easily. "We're not getting any younger, One."

"What's this 'we' shit, Admiral?"

He snorted. "You really know how to hurt a guy, _Captain_."

She sighed, and her shoulders dipped for a moment. "Could we discuss this privately?" Her gaze darted around furtively at the surrounding buildings and trees. "I'm feeling rather exposed here."

With a grim look he pushed the chair forward, allowing her to precede him.

* * *

One paced back and forth on the non-skid flooring in their suite, while Chris reclined much as he always did when at ease, looking as though he had been thrown by the blast of some incendiary device, his long arms and legs stretching out to take up nearly three-quarters of the surprisingly comfortable institutional sofa. Both had exchanged their dress uniforms for comfortable civilian attire.

He was the first to speak, throwing down the gauntlet. "So, what is it? You scared?"

"Yes, I'm scared."

"Come on, sweetheart; it'll be fun. Besides, it wouldn't have to change anything."

"Then why bother?"

"One, I was this close—" he held up his thumb and forefinger, with barely a millimeter between them "—to being a ward of the Federation, with no say about my care or my future."

She arched a silky brow at him. "Speaking as a former ward of the Federation, it is wholly survivable."

"Completely different circumstances and you know it."

"So you want to marry me in the increasingly unlikely event that you suffer a catastrophic injury and require me to put you out of your misery? I don't have to marry you to kill you, Chris." She gave him a calculating smile that would have sent a shiver up the spine of many a lesser man.

He laughed inappropriately loudly, and the person in the adjoining suite thumped the wall with his fist.

"Shhhh!" Chris admonished a silent One, who rolled her eyes.

She sat down on the sofa next to him, pointedly looking anywhere but at him. "Chris, I don't have any personal or cultural or social framework for marriage. I don't know what marriage looks like or acts like. Apart from the Aprils, who do we know who's married?"

"Declan and Huyen."

"Let their term expire."

He blinked. "Really? They always seemed happy enough. José and Alina."

She winced. "José was on the Farragut…"

"Shit, I knew that, why didn't I remember that?" He closed his eyes, reabsorbing the loss of his former navigator. "You sent something to Alina, right?"

"A letter and flowers, from both of us."

"Thank you." He sighed, disgusted with himself, and then seemed to shake it off. "Well, there's my father and stepmother…"

"Whom _I've_ never met…"

"They'll like you," he said, smiling at her, his eyes crinkling handsomely at the corners.

"What makes you so—wait—_will_? They're coming to see you?" She didn't say 'finally', but it was in her tone.

"Ah, you know the transport routes have been jacked up since…" he waved his hand, indicating _everything_. "…so it's taken them a while to get civilian interplanetary passage, but, yeah; two weeks."

"They'll think I'm an ice queen; I have that effect on Terrans," One said, worrying at her lower lip with her teeth.

He shook his head. "Nah; my dad will think you're quite the tomato."

She made a moue of distaste. "_'Tomato'_?"

"He likes 'em tall, smart and bossy. And my stepmother will approve, but only if you're really nice to me." He looked at her, looking so winsome and boyish that, perversely, she wanted to slug him.

She stood, and began pacing again; he watched her closely as she scrubbed her palms up and down her trouser legs, as if drying them. "How do you feel about children?" she asked in a small voice.

That wasn't what he was expecting her to say; his eyebrows went up in surprise. "Why? Are you pregnant?" His expression was about as neutral as it could be, neither delighted nor horrified at the prospect.

"I can't have children, Chris." She blurted it, like one of Chris's former cadets would have tossed a substandard project onto his desk for judgment. Her typical ramrod-straight posture brought vividly to mind a cadet standing at attention, waiting for his sentence.

"I can live with that; I never planned on being a parent."

She blinked. "Really? Most Terran men—"

"—Most Terran men haven't signed up for Starfleet; I don't require any more from you than what you're prepared to give. I've waited this long—" He stopped abruptly and sighed. "Don't take this as anything other than curiosity, but how do you _know_ you can't have children?"

"I'm amenorrheic; my eggs were harvested as soon as I was sexually mature."

She had surprised him again. "Uh, what?"

"It's part of the breeding program. Females have a limited span of fertility, so the program was created to ensure that we don't waste it bearing what they deemed genetically inferior offspring."

"Jesus." He shook his head. "Since we've never spent more than a week or two in constant contact I just assumed that you were able to, I don't know, adjust your cycle, or that we got lucky on the timing or something."

"_You're _lucky. I'm thorough," she said, but she smiled to take the edge off.

"In case you haven't noticed, I'm not all that lucky." He reached for her hand and squeezed it. "Present company excepted."

"I, uh, probably have some… genetic offspring on Ilyria. Not many; I presume they destroyed the eggs after I left, since my defection clearly indicated mental instability." She looked at him, and then cleared her throat. "Don't waste your time feeling sorry for me."

He tugged her down to sit on his lap, and she tucked her head into his shoulder. "I'm sorry it happened, not sorry for _you_." He stroked her hair. "You're the bravest person I've ever met, One."

"I'm not so brave."

"Sure you are. I'm a little in awe of you and always have been; to escape all that when you were just a kid… when I was that age all I was trying to do was get my hands into Sheila Nuñez's pants, and there you were getting Federation Council acts overturned, defecting to a foreign government, inciting intergalactic diplomatic incidents, earning your emancipation and then starting at the Academy."

"That wasn't bravery; it was desperation," One said with a tiny smile.

"Didn't you ever doubt yourself? Think that you were doing something crazy?"

She shrugged; the gesture was uncharacteristically diffident. "There were times when I nearly had a failure of nerve, especially when I got on that first freighter alone, or when the Ilyrian ambassador's staff was hounding me, but I made sure to burn all of my bridges so there was no way back. In the end it turned out well enough."

"You've done a lot of things that looked frightening at the outset that turned out just fine." If she didn't know Chris, know how guileless and 'gee-whiz, honest, mister,' he could look when he was trying to work things to his ship's—or his own—advantage, he could have won her over completely.

One sat up, peering at him through narrowed eyes. "Well, that's more subtle than your usual pep talk. So what is it that you want from marriage to me, specifically?"

He grinned at her, not at all disappointed that she wasn't taken in. "You mean, like positions and role playing and turn-ons, that sort of thing?"

"No," she said frostily, giving him a quelling look. "Besides, if you haven't figured those out by now, I can't help you."

He sat for a few moments, considering. "If I told you it was because you're my best friend, you'd tell me to go ask Phil." He shrugged. "And Phil already said he doesn't like me thatway."

"Idiot." One kissed him.

"Me or him?" Chris asked.

"Both of you, of course."

He nodded, satisfied. "I trust you more than anyone I know; I like seeing you naked, which I can't say for Phil, and don't ask me how I know that."

"I wouldn't dream of it, but you still haven't answered my question."

"I guess I'll have to drag out the big guns, then, won't I?" He took a deep breath and spoke; his voice was pitched softly, but she could feel the rumble of it in his chest. "'Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb; Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand, Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web, And snared by the ungloving of thy hand'." He laced his fingers through hers and stroked her wrist with his thumb.

A pause, then: "Damn you." She thumped him on the shoulder with her head.

"Is that a 'yes'?"

"It's an 'I will take it under advisement, and the Keats was really damned effective.'"

"Thanks. Phil said he liked that part, too. Before he turned me down flat."

She thumped him again.

* * *

A/N: I don't think it's possible to take all of a female's eggs in one basket, as it were, but just for the sake of sci-fi and dystopian paternalistic governments, let's just pretend the Ilyrians perfected the technology to do so, mmkay?

Pike quotes from Keats's poem "Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb," if that's not really obvious.

My interpretation of and embellishment of One's home world is based on taraljc's Number One canon, notably in "By Any Other Name". Read it here


End file.
